Wild Wells

Wild Wells A photographic journal of Wells‑next‑the‑Sea. Small observations of light, weather and place, one image at a time.

The Greeks named their mountain Olympus because that's where the gods lived. When explorers found this range in Washingt...
30/07/2026

The Greeks named their mountain Olympus because that's where the gods lived. When explorers found this range in Washington State, the snow, the scale, the cloud that never quite leaves the peaks, they used the same word.

There wasn't another one adequate to the job.

Some places earn their names before the names arrive.

At a distance it's just a cluster of white bells in the shade of the path.Crush a leaf and everything changes. The three...
24/07/2026

At a distance it's just a cluster of white bells in the shade of the path.

Crush a leaf and everything changes. The three-cornered leek is a wild garlic relative, pungent, immediate, completely at odds with the delicacy of the flower above it. Edible. Potent. Not what it appears.

Some things save their real character for when you're not just looking.

Most people see the hydrangea from a step or two back.From there it's a bloom ... colour, shape, a soft mass of pink. Wh...
23/07/2026

Most people see the hydrangea from a step or two back.

From there it's a bloom ... colour, shape, a soft mass of pink. Which is enough.

But get close enough and the centre of a lacecap hydrangea is something else entirely. A tight cluster of tiny buds in deep red, burnt orange, purple, each one in the process of becoming. A whole other image inside the first one.

Most things are like this, if you're prepared to move closer.

Cottage gardens in July are doing something quietly spectacular.The hydrangeas especially. They grow behind old walls an...
23/07/2026

Cottage gardens in July are doing something quietly spectacular.

The hydrangeas especially. They grow behind old walls and along narrow paths, in gardens tended by the same hands for decades. You come across them on the way to somewhere else, and they stop you.

This one stopped me.

The kestrel can see ultraviolet light.Stand at the cliff edge at Mundesley and try to imagine what that means. The grass...
21/07/2026

The kestrel can see ultraviolet light.

Stand at the cliff edge at Mundesley and try to imagine what that means. The grass on the slope below isn't just grass, it's a map, lit in frequencies we can't access, every vole trail marked since last night.

While we look at the kestrel, the kestrel is reading something we can't.

It isn't looking at us. It never was.

There are fewer of them every year.The curlew is on the Red List, the most urgent category of conservation concern in th...
20/07/2026

There are fewer of them every year.

The curlew is on the Red List, the most urgent category of conservation concern in the UK. Numbers have fallen by half since the 1990s. The reasons are complicated: habitat loss, predation, a slow attrition that doesn't make headlines.

This one is on the Wells shoreline, stepping between the algae and the grey water, doing what curlews have always done here.

Watch it carefully. We owe it that much.

It had chosen a good spot.The outcrop at the waterline, the tide doing whatever the tide was doing, the blue of the estu...
19/07/2026

It had chosen a good spot.

The outcrop at the waterline, the tide doing whatever the tide was doing, the blue of the estuary catching the late light. A boat hull in the way. A camera beyond that.

The curlew stood where it wanted to stand. The rest was somebody else's concern.

For centuries, the spoonbill didn't breed in Britain.Then, slowly, quietly, it came back to the coast of North Norfolk, ...
18/07/2026

For centuries, the spoonbill didn't breed in Britain.

Then, slowly, quietly, it came back to the coast of North Norfolk, to the marshes and mudflats it had always known. A small, improbable return.

This one is standing in the shallows at Wells in the late light. Bill raised and orange tipped, like the colour of a fresh Norfolk egg.

Some things come back.

The path from the quay to the RNLI station is not where you expect to find one.But there it was, tucked into the embankm...
17/07/2026

The path from the quay to the RNLI station is not where you expect to find one.

But there it was, tucked into the embankment grass, perfectly still, one ear turned to whatever it could hear that I couldn't. The mud of the shoreline just below. The harbour going about its business behind.

Wells has its own way of surprising you.

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